Some cheap or small pcb's would be a good training ground before moving with confidence to your pretty cube. The technique for stained glass soldering is a bit more involved than regular soldering, but is really not that difficult and can be done well after some simple practice. After all your boards have gone through this it's time to move on to learning stained glass style soldering! First, take your roll of copper foil, and wrap the edges of your boards with the foil, one continuous piece per edge, keeping the majority of the foil on the inside fiberglass portion of your board, an ideal width of foil to fold over the front face would be ~1/2 a centimeter, to reduce the amount of solder needed to cleanly attach the two boards. Then, simply cut a length of wire, poke it through the hole and solder it in place. Once your boards have been made, take them over to the drill press and drill holes big enough to poke a copper wire through in the area where your sensors will be. Once you have pretty boards all ready to go, continue on to the next step. Or if you happen to have access to awesome cutting edge machinery that can make pristine boards for you, such as the Othermill from Othermachine, definitely go that route, I'm jealous. Now that you have a design in mind, the next step is to make circuit boards ready for assembly, there are a few ways to go about this, one detailed in a previous Instructable of mine here: It may be worth pursuing if activating an object by simply placing your hand a foot above it excites you, I know it gave me quite a bit of fun. This is very cool, and can even be utilized for this or other projects, but is a much buggier process to troubleshoot. A capacitive touch sensor with too large a surface area WILL DETECT WITHOUT TOUCH. If your touch sensitive area is too large, something extremely fun and interesting happens, but this can also be the cause of many headaches and is not a desirable outcome for this project. This can be done very easily by incorporating a small island of copper into your design, to act as your "button." This is the area that we will hard wire to our arduino. Now we get to have some fun! Your aesthetic is completely up to you and your application, but there are a few things to keep in mind before simply soldering a pcb or other conductive material to an arduino and trying to run some code, specifically, the size and shape of your touch sensitive areas.įirst, what may be extremely obvious to some but maybe not others, isolate your touch sensitive areas from the rest of the object.
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